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Wonder PRINT

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To find out the truth and join with his Vampire mate, Blake may have to pay a steep price—his sanity.

It’s not that Blake Hollister doesn’t want to be the mate of the town’s resident hottie Vampire, Adam Harkin—just the opposite. With everything else in his life going to hell, that’s the one thing that Blake wants more than anything. But fate has other ideas. Blake is Dormant, meaning his magical powers never manifested when he came of age, leaving him doomed to be forever connected with magic, but never able to access it. Sex between magical beings and non-magics is risky at first and becomes exponentially more dangerous, and Adam isn’t willing to harm his mate, effectively pausing their relationship until some solution can be found.

At the same time, darker things are manifesting in Kelvin. Secrets buried in the ruins of the town’s old amusement park, Wonderworld, threaten to destroy the fragile peace. And when Blake finally convinces Adam to give sex a shot despite the risk, the destructive effects on his mind that he tries to hide threaten to drive him insane. Blake’s once structured life begins to shatter—days turn into fractured memories of events he can’t be sure really occurred, a broken slideshow of nightclubs, theme parks, and torrid sex. Dreams and reality, past and present, betrayal and loyalty are all on a collision course, and at the center stands the mercury-eyed fantasy whom Blake is beginning to think he might love—if the long-forgotten truth about Adam’s brutal change from human to Vampire doesn’t turn the entire town against each other first…

Reader Advisory: This book contains scenes of exhibitionism, violence and torture.

Publisher's Note: This book is best read in sequence as part of a series.

General Release Date: 24th October 2014

Excerpt Click to toggle

On Thursday, I was a fresh graduate whose internship had turned itself into a full-time position with an entire department answering to me, a kick-ass benefits package and a succession plan that had me on the fast track to upper management. By Sunday, I was alone in a new town with no prospects and a rent check I couldn’t pay.

Funny, how it all worked out.

Blake Hollister. Accounting Information System Lead. My business card wavered in my loose grip, fluttering lightly between my fingers. It looked so professional—the crisp, slightly textured paper, the subtle silver foil embedded in the company’s logo to make it catch in the light. They couldn’t have been cheap. If I didn’t know better I might’ve guessed that was part of the reason why IatriCache had imploded overnight. But thanks for that rested squarely on the shoulders of the falsely recorded write-downs, buried liabilities and inflated assets that had launched the once great medical supply company into the shame-ridden throne that Enron had held on to for almost two decades. My internship in the accounting department hadn’t afforded me anywhere near the kind of power I would’ve needed to have actually taken part in the fiasco, but it had still taken every trick I’d had to prove that I wasn’t complicit, and the scar on my résumé was never going to go away.

The business card slipped free and caught in the breeze, drifting up enough for my eye to catch on the peak of the Ferris wheel on the other side of a mass of trees. On all sides, I was surrounded by decades-old trash, shattered glass, abandoned buildings, up-ended food-carts. What was left of the rides lay in shambles, frozen pictures in time with a grimy filter of desolation.

Wonderworld.

The amusement park had gone under almost thirty years earlier. Its story had fascinated me as soon as I’d found out that the company was dumping me into this otherwise innocuous college town, the one stain on the otherwise bright future supplied here on tap by the constant stream of hopeful students and successful, fresh graduates. What the hell was an abandoned park doing some ten minutes away from a university? And given that, how was it still so relatively intact?

If I had to guess, I would’ve pinned it on the oppressive air of the place. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever known—it was as though the park was alive. Gritty, world-weary, the ultimate effect of every bead of rust and shard of shattered glass that it contained. It was dark. Cynical. Pissed off and resentful that I had penetrated its defenses and now could stare into its raw misery.

In a weird way, Wonderworld was like me. And I was like it.

Each of us had been amazing—the best at what we did. Wonderworld had helped lead the charge in the rollercoaster boom, famous nationwide in its day. I’d gotten overload approvals every semester—graduated a semester early with two bachelor’s degrees while working full-time. Over the summers, I took on internships to fill the gap in my schedules. I was always on the dean’s list, and my grades and extracurriculars got me accepted into the accelerated master’s program without even having to take the GMAT. Then, low and behold, I was headhunted by a major firm and got on full-time.

And just like that, in a single moment, everything went wrong. At the park, an accident they still had yet to explain had torn apart their crowning jewel, the Skyline Coaster, killing dozens and wounding countless others. In my case, an entire corporation had fallen apart underneath my feet, stranding me alone, broke and terrified. It didn’t matter how many great things we had done—we were lost causes, ruined by a single act that could outshine any past greatness and obliterate the future. I knew I was being a fatalist, but I didn’t even know how to get home at this point, much less how to restart my entire career path. Not to mention, that would have required having a home to go back to.

I wandered aimlessly through the sunset-drenched dusk of the trashed park, slugging through mud that ran up over the edge of the dress shoes that were now worth more than the contents of my checking account. The bottoms of my slacks were turning sickly brown, but I didn’t stop until I’d stumbled up onto a cement hemisphere, finally looking up as I was jolted out of my downward spiral of a thought process.

The white paint was peeling off of the horse in flakes of glittering, lead-laced Krylon that was obviously older than I was. The darkness of the hungry night made it hard to discern details, but I could make out a mottled pink bridle dangling precariously from its frozen-open mouth, painted leather that was slowly being ravaged by mold from the moist air surrounding it. An ear had snapped off years earlier. Her name—Empress—was almost indistinguishable on the purple saddle, and her chipped black eyes bore imploringly into me.

The fake jewels that had once adorned her sides had long since been stripped from her, leaving only black depressions stained by age-old adhesive. My fingers brushed over the side of her neck, but the ancient paint there disintegrated immediately, leaving a gash of black on her and a collection of white dust on my skin. I swept my hand upward, extended one finger to touch the corner of Empress’ eye and pulled downward in a line following the sweep of her cheekbone before swirling in a tight circle, as if a tear had followed that path and pooled there.

My hand drifted lower again, back to the relatively unchipped expanse of her ivory neck. I swept the same finger as before across her surface, sending the tiniest of flakes spinning into the humid air around me as I pulled and traced along her. When my work was done, I took a step back to observe it, climbing down off the platform with a creak to stand on the more solid earth.

Ten years without maintenance hadn’t gone well for Empress and her comrades. Most were in far worse shape than she—a few had been torn from their poles completely, some now faced forward blindly as their entire heads were gone. Legs were missing, and whole swaths of the carousel’s roof had caved in places.

Love me.

It was a simple request, one that Empress now championed for all of her brothers and sisters of disrepair. The words sat just above her inscribed name, as if she had signed it to make it more real.

I’d always thought that I’d have all the time in the world to make friends, and have fun, and be in a relationship once I had everything else in my life lined up. I had to get through my education and get a steady job, and then I could worry about all those things. I was always happy enough to know that I was doing everything right—I always knew there’d be more time. But standing here, in this park that could be my future if I let it be—standing here now that time had run out, decades before it ever should have—I couldn’t help but wonder if I should’ve been trying for more than just a few pieces of paper on a wall.

It would’ve been too easy to blame my problems on the world. I’d been born into a life brimming over with magic—Freelance mage parents, Empathic older sister. Spells had forever drifted lazily around my house like smoke in a bar. Everyone had been taking shots on what I was going to be when I became empowered—a Freelancer? Something more unique, like my sister? It was anyone’s guess.

Of course, what no one had guessed was the one-in-a-million chance that nothing would happen at all when I turned thirteen.

Dormant.

I’d always hated the word—as though my powers were just waiting for some miracle switch to flip on. The truth of the matter was that the odds of ever manifesting magical abilities when you were a Dormant were infinitely worse than that of becoming one in the first place. Basically, through no fault of anyone’s, I was doomed to be forever connected with magic, but never able to access it. My threads of power were like steel bars in my chest, useless, my wrist blank of any kind of Mark.

But had I fucking let that stop me? Break me down, like it did to so many people stuck in my position? No. No, I’d buckled down like the rest of the magic-less world and studied my ass off, worked like a dog and earned a full scholarship to the farthest school I could manage, away from my sister’s smothering concern for my ‘emotional stability’, from my parents’ patent blend of pity and disappointment. I loved all three of them, but they couldn’t understand how much it hurt to be near them, so I’d left. And for a while, everything had been good. I could forget how unfair so many things were by drowning them in the achievements I’d carved out for myself over the years. I didn’t forget the world of magic, just kept it in the peripherals, always sharing the subtle nod with the magical beings I came across, never letting them know I technically wasn’t part of the club.

And just when everything was finally lining up, it all somehow went terribly wrong—

Clink!

It was a tiny sound, but enough of one to pull me out of my pity-party, make me turn around to face it. Nothing seemed out of place, but the trailing tingle in my chest was an off-putting brand of familiar, and I wandered back toward the destroyed carousel. Empress still stood frozen in place, untouched. But the horse in front of her, Duke, shook ever so slightly, as if caught in a breeze despite the still air. Confused, I looked the horse over for a cause of the motion.

You first.

The words were written on its surface just as mine had been on Empress, with a jagged line scraped beneath them.

About the author Click to toggle

Erik Clarke is still trying to figure out how to balance work, school, writing, and the ever—elusive "social life". He's also still trying to figure out when the outlandish plots and crazy characters he'd scribbled into the margins of his notebooks for years somehow coalesced into an actual novel.

Born in Ohio and now struggling through the constant love/hate relationship that is living in the beautiful but sweltering Arizona landscape, Erik is thankful every day for the incredible, supportive family and friends that surround him—and for the sheer joy that writing two characters to their happily ever can bring.

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